The One Big Happy from the 8th:
(Thanks to John Baker — see the comments — this is a good copy of the cartoon, to replace the Denver Post version, sent to me by Benita Bendon Campbell, in the first draft of this posting. GoComics will eventually release the strip on-line.)
Bonnie’s comment:
“So on fleek” is news to me.
Well, it’s genuinely recent.
Back on the 3rd, in “The pickle watch”, a survey of matters concerning pickles (pickled cucumbers) as food and as phallic symbols — and now fresh pickle news comes from Mike Pope, who encountered this remarkable object at McLendon Hardware in Renton WA, on a shelf of stuff from Archie McPhee:
(#1) The electronic yodelling pickle, combining in one small battery-operated package the double risibility of pickles with the quaint ridiculousness of yodelling
From the Archie McPhee site:
Are you sick and tired of trying to convince a jar of pickles to yodel using melodious mind bullets and sheer force of will? So were we. At last, the Electronic Yodelling Pickle that you have always hoped for! Each 5-1/4” long plastic pickle yodels its little heart out at the push of a button. Batteries included.
You can listen to the EYP’s siren song on the site.
Yesterday’s posting “Rice pudding in the land of quilted steel” focused on diner rice pudding, but the Wikipedia article covers quite a large territory, including rice puddings in different cultures around the world and rice pudding in popular culture. On the latter front, there’s a humorous poem “Rice Pudding” by A.A. Milne (of Winnie the Pooh fame) that Benita Bendon Campbell has reminded me of. The poem takes off from the Anglo-American tradition of rice pudding as plain food for children or invalids — and shows young Mary Jane’s rebellion against the tradition: “She won’t eat her dinner – rice pudding again”.
Plant 1 and Plant 2. They are both immensely attractive as nectar sources to pollinators (butterflies, moths, hummingbirds, especially). They both have spires of (often) purple flowers, which frequently arch over rather than standing erect; and both have opposite lancelolate leaves. They both often grow in clumps a foot or two high:
(#1) Plant 1
(#2) Plant 2
But viewed up close, they are clearly very different plants.
Today’s Zippy takes us to the Schuyler Diner (500 Schuyler Ave.) in Lyndhurst NJ (20 miles west of Manhattan), where Zippy and Griffy debate quilted steel while on the prowl for rice pudding: diner chic. And the diner staff are sore pressed (“Sometimes I think I shall go mad”, one cries out, literarily.)
(#1)
Yesterday’s Zippy goes out for sliders:
(#1) Zippy chats with counter man Sid at the Zipworld counterpart of the Little Tavern, 115 Washington Blvd. in Laurel MD, where donuts now roll alongside the sliders
Two recent One Big Happy strips on linguistic themes, one phonological / orthographic, the other semantic / pragmatic:
(#1)
(#2)
Recently in Zippy, two poignant strips about cartoonist Bill Griffith’s childhood and the cartoon character Little Max; and then today, a strip in which Zippy wakes up three days in a row transformed into a cartoon character, only to emerge from these dreams on the fourth day — but as yet another cartoon character.
My morning name from a few weeks ago was the technical term oxytone. From NOAD2:
adj. oxytone: (especially in ancient Greek) having an acute accent on the last syllable.
with an etymology < Gk. ὀξύτονος, oxýtonos, ‘sharp-sounding’. with the first of our ‘sharp’ elements in modern English: OXY, oxy– (from Greek) or oxi– (from Latin).
As a prosodic term in Greek, it’s part of the set:
oxytone – paroxytone – proparoxytone
corresponding to the more familiar Latin terms:
ultimate – penultimate – antepenultimate
— that is,
final, last – next to last, second from the end – third from the end
OXY is familiar from the rhetorical term oxymoron < Gk. ὀξύς oksús ‘sharp, keen, pointed’ + μωρός mōros ‘dull, stupid, foolish’ — as it were, ‘sharp-dull’, referring to apparently contradictory combinations of expressions.
But wait, there’s more!
Q: Did they ever have anatomic war?
A: Have you never heard of the great Anatomic War and one of its signal encounters, the 1346 Battle of Extremities, in which the Phalanges, with their long bones, overwhelmed the armored Carpals and Metacarpals?
(#1) Phalanges shooting down the Carpal and Metacarpal forces